


Downward Spiral

by nightlilly



Series: The Quirk Archives [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Blood, But Will Be Damned if its Not Finished, Funky Disco Horror Hallway, Gen, It/Its Pronouns For Michael | The Distortion (The Magnus Archives), Knife Hands, Literal Drops of Blood, Not A Lot To Tag Here, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Spiral!Midoriya, The Author is Regretting This Series, fuckhands mcmike - Freeform, slight transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:00:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26384542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightlilly/pseuds/nightlilly
Summary: For once, can people just see the world the way Izuku sees things? For once can he be right instead of utterly, horribly, wrong?
Relationships: Midoriya Izuku & Helen Richardson, Midoriya Izuku & Michael Shelley, Midoriya Izuku & The Spiral (The Magnus Archives), Midoriya Izuku & Yagi Toshinori | All Might, Midoriya Izuku/Todoroki Shouto
Series: The Quirk Archives [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734805
Comments: 4
Kudos: 82





	Downward Spiral

**Author's Note:**

> *Take On Me by a-ha plays muffled from behind a door*

Ever since he found out he was quirkless, Izuku felt as if he were looking at the world differently from everyone else. Everyone else had a quirk. Everyone else seemed miles ahead of him, no matter what he did, no matter how much he succeeded, he always seemed to be several steps behind, perhaps even facing a different direction entirely.

His mother always told him that if he had problems, he should always talk about them. He tried before, but no one seemed to listen. Quirkless voices always fell on deaf ears. No one understood what it was like to be quirkless when they had a quirk. No one offered sympathy for someone they couldn't understand. His mother tried, she did her best, and he loved her for that but it was hard. She never meant to be hurtful, but sometimes it was the way she phrased things. Other times it was the things she didn't say.

Izuku had always felt as if he were seeing the world through a kaleidoscope. Everyone around him saw the world the same. Everything was fine. Everything was perfect. Everything had its place and there was no room for the quirkless. _Should_ be no room for the quirkless.

Izuku saw it differently.

All men were not created equal. He'd known that since he was five, and nothing had changed since then. He had problems because of this, because he was not on equal footing with his peers. He saw every crack, every dent every scuff in the almighty hero system that was the basis of modern society. He saw what happened to the people like him, _the mistakes._ They were pushed aside, they were left for dead, they were left to drown and no one offered them a way to swim.

Izuku knew that the way this society was, and it wasn't right. It was a muted echo of what it was supposed to be, a society that boasted how far they had progressed since the dawn of quirks but how far had they really come?

He watched as the news reported on a group of protesters with heteromorphic quirks fight against discriminatory laws, the media calling them monsters. He watched as more and more quirkless kids committed suicide. He watched as more villains rose, claiming they wanted change, and watched them fall, never to be heard from again.

This was not equal. This was a fractured society barely hanging on by a thread, distorted beyond belief where people disillusioned themselves because they were like _them_ \- they weren't quirkless, they weren't villains, they weren't _mutants._

Still, Izuku persisted in his dream. He would be a hero, the first quirkless one. He would prove them all wrong.

It was shortly after his diagnosis that he started to see the door.

It was a simple, plain yellow door. Nothing out of the ordinary about it, except for the fact that it was in their apartment and he had never seen it before. He'd almost missed it too, the way it almost blended into the paint. There wasn't supposed to be a door there, just the wall.

He didn't go through it the first time he saw it. He watched a movie about that kind of thing, about a monster that would eat your eyes and trap you on the other side of the door. So he ignored it, didn't even bother to tell his mother because she was an adult. Adults never saw these kinds of things and if she did see it she would know better than to go exploring.

Still, curiosity killed the cat.

Being Izuku, being curious, being a small child with no friends and now _terrified_ of stepping outside to be mocked and ridiculed, he opened it because this was something new, something to be explored, and if the little girl from that movie could beat the monster without a quirk than so could he.

Perhaps this wouldn't be anything like a nightmare. Perhaps this would be his Wonderland.

The hallway on the other side of the door was definitely not Wonderland, stomach immediately twisting into knots, but Izuku had already had enough, so he ignored the voice in his head that sounded eerily like Kacchan, the one that called him a crybaby, and he pressed forward.

It was dark, lit by a few spaced out electric lamps, but for a child, it might as well have been pitch black. Izuku was not scared of the dark, but this place was unfamiliar, it was dark, it had no windows, and the door had just shut behind him. It also didn't help that the wallpaper seemed to be _moving._

He tried the door again. He was small, but he still knew when something wasn't right, and this hallway was every single bad experience he'd ever had mashed together.

He had made a very big mistake, tears welling up as he realized the door was locked, trying the knob more frantically as the door began to vanish right before his eyes.

He let out a sob, he cried out for his mother. Nothing happened. He wasn't a brave child, never had been - he'd inherited his mother's kind heart, he was easily startled and easy to pick on. Still, there was only one way out of this place, and if he had to go forward, he would go forward.

He just wanted to go home. This place was scary, it wasn't right.

The more he walked, the less scared he got of the actual hallway itself. He kept turning and turning and turning and it was identical hallway after identical hallway after identical hallway.

He still flinched at the way the shadows moved out of the corner of his eye.

"Pardon me."

Izuku shrieked when he heard the voice coming from behind him, sprinting off into the dark without any hesitation. He was alone in this hallway, had been the entire time. _No one else should have been behind him when the door had vanished._

"Little creature," the voice called out to him, and this time it was in front of him. Izuku skidded to a stop, turning around and almost slammed face-first into a wall. Fingernails scraped against drywall, clawing against wallpaper that moved and shifted and _shouldn't have been there_ as he tried to tear it down. It had been a straight hallway. There was no wall there.

Something grabbed him by the shoulder and he cried out again, something piercing into his skin, digging deep into flesh, and he raised his head to see the monster that would be the end of him.

"You should not be here."

Izuku did the only thing he could do. He wailed as loud as his tiny lungs could possibly allow.

The thing immediately drew its hand back, looking confused, but Izuku couldn't see anything through his tears, still screaming as loud as he could.

"Stop that," it said, its hands going to cover its ears. "Stop!"

Kacchan was right about him. He was nothing but a crybaby that was only good at running away, and now he couldn't even do that right.

_"Child, stop it at once!"_

The thing's voice was so loud, Izuku immediately snapped his mouth shut, tears still dripping down his face, snot bubbling from his nose, quiet murmurs building behind closed lips.

The thing bent down in a way that shouldn't be possible, at angles that would most definitely break several bones in a normal person, but this was, as established, not normal and not a person.

"How did you get here, child?"

"T-the-" Izuku let out a whimper, shrinking himself down. "The d-door."

"Yes," the thing said, and Izuku got a better look at it, at the spirals and patterns on its skin, moving and shifting and changing colours. Its fingers were like claws, long and sharp. Its blond hair was mangled, holding the same swirling patterns as the rest of it. Izuku's eyes were caught on them, the designs, watching them shift, now oddly calm. "But that shouldn't be possible. I did not put that door there. Which means...."

The thing bent down, reaching out towards Izuku again, and he shut his eyes and let out another whimper, but this time the monster just patted him on the head.

"You want to go home, don't you, little one?"

Izuku nodded, still frozen with fear.

"Think of a door, young one. Think of where you want to go." It smiled at him, chuckling, but its laugh was....it was _wrong,_ like everything else in this damned hallway.

And the next thing Izuku knew was that he was stepping through a bright green door, back in the same hallway he had entered from.

He ran into the kitchen, nearly ramming his head straight into the edge of the dinner table in the process, running straight for his mother, crying the entire time. Ever since that day, he wanted to forget about the door, about the creature, but there was proof, and that was the worst thing about the whole ordeal.

There had been blood on his shirt. His blood, from where that monster had grabbed him by the shoulder. His mother had seen - only for a moment - the green door before it had disappeared entirely, and she was terrified that whatever he'd seen, be it man or beast (it had to have been a person, for what else could it have been?), that it would come back for her child, her baby boy.

And that's where Izuku had made another mistake. He shouldn't have noticed the things wrong with the people at school, he shouldn't have noticed that heroes were not what they seemed to be, he shouldn't have had sympathy for the people they called _villains._

He shouldn't have told his mother that he was the one that made the green door appear.

They labelled it as a quirk, an emitter type. A warping quirk, simply called Doorway.

Izuku knew this was wrong. All his life he wished for a quirk, and this was not it. This was not a quirk, this was not what he wanted, this would not help him.

They called him a miracle - someone with an extra joint that had somehow developed a quirk against all odds. Not entirely impossible, but highly unlikely. Literally one in a billion.

~~_Wrong._ ~~

When he was nine, he made another door.

Kacchan didn't like that he lied about being quirkless. Kacchan didn't like that he didn't use his quirk at all. Teachers now stopped him when he raised his hands to Izuku ~~because he wasn't _wrong_ anymore, because he was the _right kind of person,_ one of them~~ and Kacchan _hated_ that Izuku was getting attention, getting more attention _than him._

So instead of hiding in the usual places, he used one Bakugou and his cronies would never find.

The thing was there again, and Izuku flinched upon seeing it again, but he wasn't scared.

"Odd," it commented. "When someone finds out they can bend space at will, they usually take every single opportunity to do so."

Izuku sighed as he leaned with his back against the wall. Well, not the wall. It probably wasn't actually a real wall with the way it moved, but it looked like a wall, so it did its job.

"If you're going to kill me or eat me or whatever, just do it already."

The thing cocked its head to the side. "I am not going to do that."

"Why not?" Izuku asked, and he was fully aware that it was probably very weird to start talking to the thing that shared these hallways. Despite the fact he'd only used them twice, he felt territorial over them. His power, his hallways, plain and simple.

"You and I are, shall we say, _of the same cloth_. Would be pointless for our patron if we wasted time _devouring_ each other like Hunters."

"Patron?"

"Well," the thing sighed - and he really did have to stop calling it a thing, if it claimed they were somewhat similar - crossing its arms and Izuku wondered how it didn't pierce itself with its own long fingers. "If you had stayed longer instead of screaming, I would have had time to explain, wouldn't I?"

"What's your name?"

The thing shrugged. "Names are not exactly something that things like me would use, but other humans have taken to calling me Michael."

"What are you, exactly?"

The thi- Michael only shrugged again.

"You.....you said we were similar." Izuku bit his lip. "Does that mean that, that I'll-"

"Oh. No. No, it won't happen to you, and frankly, I'm both glad and jealous." Michael laughed again, and this time Izuku flinched. That laugh haunted his dreams for years. Hearing it in person was not helping in the slightest.

" _It won't happen to me,"_ he echoed back. "So....what happened to Michael?"

"I am Michael, so to speak. Or at least what is left of him. We are the same, him and I, and yet not. We are - I am - something that is not supposed to be. A distortion of what once was, if you will. You are not a distortion, but you can see it, can't you? You can see the way things really are. You don't need to see any clearer because you were born with the right kind of glasses - or perhaps, it would be more appropriate of me to say the _wrong_ kind of glasses. Not to say that these hallways won't change you, but unless you choose so, you will...mostly remain you. Whoever you are."

"Izuku," he said plainly. "My name is Izuku."

"Well, then, _Izuku._ You better get used to these hallways. They are a bit difficult to navigate. Try not to lose your way, and if they get hungry, it's best you feed them quickly."

Michael had been right of course, and hadn't that been ironic? The only one in his life that had been straightforward with him, honest with him, had been the epitome of everything wrong.

It was a bit sadistic, the way he toyed with his abusers, but again, Michael was right. His hallways were hungry. He didn't know how he knew, he didn't question how _hallways_ of all things could be _hungry,_ but Izuku knew. He'd start getting an itch - not a physical itch but one that clawed at him regardless. His hallways needed to be fed as soon as possible or else that itch wouldn't go away, testing at his insides, begging him to let them be used.

He never fed them properly. Michael was bitter with the way he was, and Izuku always felt guilty that as the only one that visited the man's hallways, he was just rubbing salt in open wounds. So Izuku's ~~victims~~ playmates never stayed longer in his hallways than an hour or so before he let them go, dropping them somewhere safe but probably inconvenient for them.

He didn't need another Michael, and his hallways didn't protest at his conclusion, so long as they got to eat.

Still, he couldn't be a hero with this, this rabid power that only wanted to confuse, to torment, to _feed._

He hadn't cried when All Might had told him to give up on his dream. In some ways, he'd been expecting it. He was still quirkless, still the odd man out. He was abused and beaten and broken down by the system. He didn't know why he believed the beloved Symbol of that entire system would be any different.

He had cried when All Might had told him he was wrong. That he _could_ be a hero.

His heart broke when All Might revealed that his solution was to inherit a quirk - not just a quirk, but the quirk of the Symbol of Peace himself. Of course _Izuku Midoriya the quirkless boy_ couldn't be a hero. Of course it had to be _All Might's successor._

~~He accepted it without hesitation, even though he knew deep down it was _wrong._~~

"Young Midoriya?" His mentor had asked one day after his training, muffled behind a privacy mask as the man had taken to wearing them while in his smaller form. The beach was coming along nicely, but there was still a while to go before it was completely clear of debris. "Please do not get angry with me, but I happened to come across your file while reviewing UA applicants and I was wondering about your quirk."

 _You told me you were quirkless,_ was left unsaid.

He shrugged. "It's not a quirk."

Izuku figured his mentor would push about what exactly he meant by that - _it must've been a quirk, it's impossible for it not to be, if it's not a quirk it's_ ** _wrong_** \- but the man nodded as if he understood, adjusting his mask.

"Those seem to be getting around these days," he said almost to himself, amused. "But I'm still a bit curious."

"I can't show you." Izuku picked up a microwave, mindful of the broken glass as he placed it on his hip. "My hallways might get ideas. They might not let you back out again, especially if you're aligned with another patron. I'm sorry."

His mentor looked confused. "Your-"

"Hallways, yes."

"And what exactly do you mean by patron?"

He shrugged again. "I don't know but that's what Michael told me, and he's been in those hallways longer."

All Might didn't question him about it further, coughing up a bit of blood as he tugged on his gloves, which were always a pristine white.

His mentor had a good heart. All Might meant well in giving him his quirk. He meant well in training him, he meant well in everything he did.

It only heightened his nervousness of the upcoming entrance exam, knowing that he could have the power of the number one hero at his disposal and yet still fail in every sense of the word. He'd fail his teacher, he'd fail his mother, he'd fail himself.

~~As if some quirkless screwup could ever be a hero.~~

Helen wasn't helping in the slightest.

"If it's always too much-"

Izuku sighed and rolled his eyes. _"I can always submit myself completely to The Spiral._ I know, and for the millionth time, it's not helpful and I don't want to do it. People already think I'm weird, and I just keep getting weirder. No offence Helen, but I don't want to be a demonic fractal monster."

"The option is always open if you need it."

"I liked Michael better."

"How rude."

But it was tempting, wasn't it? Tempting to just leave, disappear, to never have to deal with any of this again. Tempting to submit himself, to let go of this human world, to finally feel _right_ in a world that was wrong, _wrong,_ ** _wrong._**

But Izuku couldn't do that to his mother, never in a million years.

He faltered only once in his resolve, on the day he took the practical exam.

No points. He'd earned not one single point. Of course, if he had to do it all again, he would've made a beeline straight to that girl that had been trapped under that rubble. No life was worth passing some stupid exam.

It still stung that he'd done all he could, and had still managed to sink so low.

Recovery Girl had healed his legs and his arm, but she had recommended that he'd keep the arm in a sling for a while. He was exhausted as he kicked at the pavement as he walked home.  
How was he supposed to face All Might now? How was he supposed to face _his mother?_

What the hell was he supposed to do now? _Who_ was he supposed to be now?

~~_You're a screwup. You know that. You're a quirkless nobody. All Might handed you his quirk gift-wrapped and you fucking wasted it. You're the_ **_wrong_ ** _choice. You always are. You think you see everything so clearly but you're_ **_wrong._ ** _They were_ **_right_ ** _about you - you're nothing but a mistake. A flaw in the system. If you think you're anything else, then you're just-_ ~~

.  
.  
À̢̛͖̫͎̙̹̟̓̍̍̋̋̾̂̚ D̷͕̹̞̤͖̮͂̃̉̓͂̄͠î̢̢͕̘̻̫̭̫͖̃͒͑̎͢s̢͎̮̮̫͙̒̋̇̽̐ť̶̨̖̹̯̍͋̓̍̊͠ͅo̙̞̰̘̰̳̪̻͖͈͑́̎̓̄̈̚͝͡r̴͈̼̭̻̓̈̓͑́͒̈́̿͟t͙͓͖͚̫̀̿̔͛̓̀̉i̡̨͕̯̹͇̯͇̲͌͛͒̓̓̽̋̚o̤̟̝̼̬͓̺̼͋̊͒̋͜͠͡n̸̲͖͈̦̞̞͉̥̻͗̓̑̈́͌̓͘ͅ  
.  
.

Izuku could sense the door before he saw it, innocuously placed on the side of a building.

It wouldn't hurt, would it? He always caused more trouble than he was worth. Mom wouldn't have had to worry about him anymore, and she could live a comfortable life without needing to support him.

He reached for the handle.

Someone grabbed his arm before he could.

"Wait!"

Izuku looked up to find two different coloured eyes staring back at him, which immediately widened in fright, and it made him want to shrink down. He knew what he looked like, his skin mapped out with patterns, lines and freckles that hadn't been there before, his fingernails and teeth sharpened with fractals reflected in his eyes.

Not the same as Helen, not one with his patron. Not merged, but rather, marked.

Yet still a monster.

"I don't know who you are," the other boy said, frazzled, "but I feel like you're about to make a big mistake."

It was if a spell had been broken.

"Oh," Izuku said, averting his gaze as quickly as he could because he just realized that this strange boy was quite pretty. "You're right. Thank you."

He reached for the door again, and the boy pulled him back.

"Don't worry, I know what I'm doing." He grabbed the handle and pulled it to the other side of the door, the metal sliding through the wood like a knife through butter as it turned from yellow to green.

"That's an....interesting quirk."

Izuku smiled, his unease about the exam results fading away. "Would you believe me if I said it's not a quirk?"

The boy's eyes flicked over to the door and then back to him. "I'd say your crazy."

Izuku smiled this time, knowing the jab wasn't said with any of the bitterness Bakugou or his other classmates had spewed at him over the years.

"You wouldn't be the first person to say that, definitely not the last either."

"Well then, why don't you show me this _not-a-quirk_ of yours?" He reached for the handle, and this time Izuku stopped him.

"Wait!" Izuku felt his face heat up - the boy's hand was warm. "Y-You're going to have to let me open the door. My hallways will get angry."

"Your hallways...will get....angry?"

Izuku bobbed his head up and down. "Yeah! They're really temperamental and they don't like it if someone else opens the door. They might not let you back out and that'll be a hassle because well I can't just let the hallway eat you - we just met. I mean, not that I'd let the hallway eat anyone I always make sure they spit people back out, but that might be a few hours afterwards. Uh! That sounds bad, now that I say it out loud I promise I'm not a creep they're just really mean to me sometimes and it's kinda funny to watch them go around in circles- oh, that doesn't sound any better I swear I'm not a villain! AnywaymynamesIzukuwhatsyours."

The boy just stared at him for a moment that felt like forever. Then laughed.

_Oh my god he's cute._

"You're definitely weird," the boy said once he'd caught his breath. "But if I'm being honest, I'd like to know more about you."

"I'm weird?!" Izuku's voice pitched higher. "You came up to a stranger about to step through a door and told them they were making a huge mistake!"

"To be fair, you did say the door eats people."

"Yeah, but you didn't know that when you started talking to me, Mr. Weirdo."

"Shouto," the boy said. "My name is Shouto."

Izuku smiled once more, feeling something warm bloom inside his chest.

"Well, Shouto, what's it going to be? Are you normal or are you going to walk through my hallway?"

Shouto smirked at him. "I think I'll take the chance and be a little weird if it means I can keep talking to you."

**Author's Note:**

> It is becoming a pattern for me to introduce other avatars in one-shots that aren't their own ;)
> 
> I honestly think that since Michael was relatively young when fed to The Spiral, he would have sympathy for children. Helen on the other hand would definitely yeet a child into the horror hallway no mercy.
> 
> I was originally going to make Izuku an avatar of The Lonely but I listened to MAG 170: Recollections and realized it might be better to save for someone else. If anyone can guess who I'll give them a shoutout.


End file.
